When designing your Quality Control (QC) procedure within Bottleneck, it is crucial to tailor your forms to your team's workflow rather than simply translating existing paper-based methods. By completing QC forms within Bottleneck, the system can automatically capture user information and completion time, streamlining the QC procedure and ensuring accuracy. Neglecting to design forms around your team's workflow may lead to inaccurate time stamps, as team members might jot down details on paper and input them into Bottleneck later. This limitation can be overcome by effectively designing a QC system for Bottleneck. In this guide, we will discuss the process of creating efficient and accurate QC forms within the Bottleneck platform.

Before creating QC forms in Bottleneck for a specific product, it's essential to thoroughly review the current paper-based workflow used by the production team when completing QC forms. Let's take an example of the "Watr" beverage production, which requires three temperature checks, spaced five minutes apart, during a 15-minute operation. Presently, the team records temperatures on a clipboard and files the sheet after production. While a single form might suffice on paper, using just one form in Bottleneck would miss the advantage of the built-in timestamp functionality and could lead to redundancy with manual data entry. To optimize the process, it's advisable to create three different QC forms—one for each temperature recording, leveraging Bottleneck's timestamp feature for accuracy and efficiency.

Once you have identified how to align your QC forms with your existing workflow, it's time to create your custom QC forms and attach them to your Bill of Materials (BOMs). To create new forms, navigate to the Quality Control tab on the Bottleneck Manufacturing Portal and select “Add QC Template”. From here, you can choose the type of questions you would like to have answered each time the form is completed, such as Numerical, Photo, Check Box, etc. By default, a notes section will be attached to each question to allow for any additional information that is not being tracked, but it is not required to be filled. After creating a QC form, you will need to approve the version you just created. This approval makes it the standard version going forward, and you can make further refinements as needed. If you have a large volume of BOMs that need to be updated with many QC forms, feel free to reach out, and Bottleneck can likely assist you in the process.

Once you have connected your custom QC forms to each BOM, your Work Orders will automatically generate the required QC forms. This is a valuable opportunity to review and reflect on your new QC process and identify any redundancies or inefficiencies. Based on your observations, you can decide whether to continue with the current implementation or redesign the forms for better effectiveness. Refining the QC process might involve further breaking up the forms, or simplifying the form using a different style of question, while considering feedback from your team members. Your QC forms are never entirely set, as you can always approve a latest or add more to a certain BOM.